John Dewey - Ultimate Collection: 40+ Works on Psychology, Education, Philosophy & Politics
or temperament to overestimate the significance of Luther. But here is what he said:
"Luther is not only the greatest but the most German man in our history. . . . He possessed qualities that we seldom see associated—nay, that we usually find in the most hostile antagonism. He was at once a dreamy mystic and a practical man of action. . . . He was both a cold scholastic word-sifter and an inspired God-drunk prophet. . . . He was full of the awful reverence of God, full of self-sacrificing devotion to the Holy Spirit, he could lose himself entirely in pure spirituality. Yet he was fully acquainted with the glories of this earth; he knew how estimable they are; it was his lips that uttered the famous maxim—
"'Who loves not woman, wine and song,
Remains a fool his whole life long.'
He was a complete man, I might say an absolute man, in whom there was no discord between matter and spirit. To call him a spiritualist would be as erroneous as to call him a sensualist. . . . Eternal praise to the man whom we have to thank for the deliverance of our most precious possessions."
And again speaking of Luther's work:
"Thus was established in Germany spiritual freedom, or as it is called, freedom of thought. Thought became a right and the decisions of reason legitimate."
The specific correctness of the above is of slight importance as compared with the universality of the tradition which made these ideas peculiarly Germanic, and Luther, therefore, a genuine national hero and type.
It is, however, with Kant that I commence. In Protestant Germany his name is almost always associated with that of Luther. That he brought to consciousness the true meaning of the Lutheran reformation is a commonplace of the German historian. One can hardly convey a sense of the unique position he occupies in the German thought of the last two generations. It is not that every philosopher is a Kantian, or that the professed Kantians stick literally to his text. Far from it. But Kant must always be reckoned with. No position unlike his should be taken up till Kant has been reverently disposed of, and the new position evaluated in his terms. To scoff at him is fair sacrilege. In a genuine sense, he marks the end of the older age. He is the transition to distinctively modern thought.
One shrinks at the attempt to compress even his leading ideas into an hour. Fortunately for me, few who read my attempt will have sufficient acquaintance with the tomes of Kantian interpretation and exposition to appreciate the full enormity of my offense. For I cannot avoid the effort to seize from out his highly technical writings a single idea and to label that his germinal idea. For only in this way can we get a clew to those general ideas with which Germany characteristically prefers to connect the aspirations and convictions that animate its deeds.
Adventuring without further preface into this field, I find that Kant's decisive contribution is the idea of a dual legislation of reason by which are marked off two distinct realms—that of science and that of morals. Each of these two realms has its own final and authoritative constitution: On one hand, there is the world of sense, the world of phenomena in space and time in which science is at home; on the other hand, is the supersensible, the noumenal world, the world of moral duty and moral freedom.
Every cultivated man is familiar with the conflict of science and religion, brute fact and ideal purpose, what is and what ought to be, necessity and freedom. In the domain of science causal dependence is sovereign; while freedom is lord of moral action. It is the proud boast of those who are Kantian in spirit that Kant discovered laws deep in the very nature of things and of human experience whose recognition puts an end forever to all possibility of conflict.
In principle, the discovery is as simple as its application is far-reaching. Both science and moral obligation exist. Analysis shows that each is based upon laws supplied by one and the same reason (of which, as he is fond of saying, reason is the legislator); but laws of such a nature that their respective jurisdictions can never compete. The material for the legislation of reason in the natural world is sense. In this sensible world of space and time, causal necessity reigns: such is the decree of reason itself. Every attempt to find freedom, to locate ideals, to draw support for man's moral aspirations in nature, is predoomed to failure. The effort of reason to do these things is contrary to the very nature of reason itself: it is self-contradictory, suicidal.
When one considers the extent in which religion has been bound up with belief in miracles, or departures from the order of nature; when one notes how support for morals has been sought in natural law; how morals have been tied up with man's natural tendencies to seek happiness and with consequences in the way of reward of virtue and punishment of vice; how history has been explained as a play of moral forces—in short, the extent to which both the grounds and the sanctions for morality have been sought within the time and space world, one realizes the scope of the revolution wrought by Kant, provided his philosophy be true. Add to this the fact that men in the past have not taken seriously the idea that every existence in space, every event in time, is connected by bonds of causal necessity with other existences and events, and consequently have had no motive for the systematic pursuit of science. How is the late appearance of science in human history to be accounted for? How are we to understand the comparatively slight influence which science still has upon the conduct of life? Men, when they have not consciously looked upon nature as a scene of caprice, have failed to bring home to themselves that nature is a scene of the legislative activity of reason in the material of sense. This fact the Kantian philosophy brings home to man once for all; it brings it home not as a pious wish, nor as a precarious hope confirmed empirically here and there by victories won by a Galileo or a Newton, but as an indubitable fact necessary to the existence of any cognitive experience at all. The reign of law in nature is the work of the same reason which proceeds empirically and haltingly to the discovery of law here and there. Thus the acceptance of the Kantian philosophy not only frees man at a single stroke from superstition, sentimentalism and moral and theological romanticism, but gives at the same stroke authorization and stimulation to the detailed efforts of man to wrest from nature her secrets of causal law. What sparse groups of men of natural science had been doing for the three preceding centuries, Kant proclaimed to be the manifestation of the essential constitution of man as a knowing being. For those who accept the Kantian philosophy, it is accordingly the magna charta of scientific work: the adequate formulation of the constitution which directs and justifies their scientific inquiries. It is a truism to say that among the Germans as nowhere else has developed a positive reverence for science. In what other land does one find in the organic law mention of Science, and read in its constitution an express provision that "Science and its teaching are free"?
But this expresses only half of Kant's work. Reason is itself supersensible. Giving law to the material of sense and so constituting nature, it is in itself above sense and nature, as a sovereign is above his subjects. The supersensible world is thus a more congenial field for its legislative activity than the physical world of space and time. But is any such field open to human experience? Has not Kant himself closed and locked the gates in his assertion that the entire operation of man's knowing powers is confined to the realm of sense in which causal necessity dominates? Yes, as far as knowledge is concerned. No, as far as moral obligation is concerned. The fact of duty, the existence of a categorical command to act thus and so, no matter what the pressure of physical surroundings or the incitation of animal inclinations, is as much a fact as the existence of knowledge of the physical world. Such a command cannot proceed from nature. What is cannot introduce man to what ought to be, and thus impose its own opposite upon him. Nature only enmeshes men in its relentless machine-like movement. The very existence of a command in man to act for the sake of what ought to be—no matter what actually is—is thus of itself final proof of the operation of supersensible reason within human experience: not, indeed, within theoretical or cognitive experience, but within moral experience.
The moral law, the law of obligation, thus proceeds from a source in man above reason. It is token of his membership as a moral being in a kingdom of absolute ends above nature. But it is also directed to something in man which is equally above nature: it appeals to and demands freedom. Reason is incapable of anything so irrational, so self-contradictory, as imposing a law of action to which no faculty of action corresponds. The freedom of the moral will is the answer to the unqualified demand of duty. It is not open to man to accept or reject this truth